The curtain rises. Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci are having sex onstage, a few yards away from you. Or so it seems. The grunting and groaning, complete with Edie's legs wrapped around Stanley's back, ends in a bedspring creaking crescendo. These two brave and wonderful actors have literally stripped themselves bare for you.

In the afterglow, Frankie (Edie Falco) fidgets nervously, anxious that she has just slept with a guy on their first date. She wishes out loud that she still smoked, so she could calm herself down. Johnny (Stanley Tucci) is a short order cook at the restaurant where Frankie works as a waitress. The date followed her admiration of his wrists as she watched him slice and dice. Frankie has been around the block a time or two. She has no illusions about love, and is glad just to have some physical company.

Johnny, on the other hand, is revealed to be a non-stop talker, and a dreamer par excellence. He's got just as much history as Frankie, if not more, but life has not ground the idealism out of him. He is definitely not a cynic in matters of the heart. In fact, he has already decided, at this early stage, that he and Frankie will marry. And he won't leave Frankie's apartment until he gets her to acknowledge and accept this astounding fact.

This is the simple premise of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, a beautifully crafted play from the pen of Terrence McNally. In an acting tour de force, Falco and Tucci never leave the stage. The only other voice we hear belongs to an FM disc jockey, one of those deep-voiced, anonymous announcers who ply the early morning airwaves and wonder if anyone out there is really listening. In honor of the new lovers, Johnny calls the station and persuades the man to play "the most beautiful music ever written." Thus---Clair de Lune. The phone call to the radio station is touching and poetic, and is a dramatic highlight of this play, which at bottom is about the joy and redeeming qualities of love. Frankie's eyes glisten as she realizes the depth of feeling she has somehow evoked from this man, who is still a relative stranger to her.

Falco and Tucci are perfectly cast in these roles. They fit the characters far better than Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, who were in the movie version several years ago. There is no makeup here, and very little wardrobe. Frankie looks just like the world weary waitresses you see in dismal hash houses. Johnny resembles the cooks who frequent the grills and broilers of the same world. If this had been a musical, the score would have been done by Tom Waits. Falco's appearance onstage is a million miles away from the perfectly-coiffed Carmella Soprano of the HBO hit series The Sopranos. This very lack of artifice provides an opportunity to just plain act, and Falco is more than up to the task.

Tucci's work here is equally impressive. He's totally believable as a self-educated and eccentric short order cook who loves to quote (and sometimes misquote) Shakespeare. When Johnny refuses to leave Frankie's apartment after their initial tryst, we are led to believe that he may be one of those weirdos who can't stop talking about themselves, and who are appropriate for placement in the mental health system. But we gradually come to understand that his eccentricities are benign and somewhat sweet. Johnny is a very physical character, but also a cerebral one. He is forever analyzing life, no matter how many miles may be on the odometer.

Frankie and Johnny together have possibilities, and as we file out of the theater we are truly rooting for them to have a future. We are also shaking our heads in wonder at the sheer talent of two dedicated, unaffected actors who have demonstrated their ability to touch your heart with the power of their art.

Recommended: Yes